A Labor of Love: A Content Analysis of Blogs Written By Gestational Surrogates

Background and Purpose:  While social workers have an institutionalized role in adoption, the profession’s potential role in global surrogacy arrangements and in any emerging international regulations on surrogacy has recently been recognized. As social workers begin to initiate a discourse on surrogacy, there is a need for social work scholars to be engaged in research on the surrogate experience.

Gestational surrogacy arrangements continue to grow. Many are speaking out against surrogacy citing dehumanization, commodification, baby-selling, and exploitation; surrogacy has been banned in much of the world, despite few empirical studies on surrogates’ experiences and attitudes. The United States is one country in which surrogacy remains legal and is a popular global surrogacy destination. Surrogates in the United States are not an invisible group but are active users of internet forums and blogs.

My study was on the framing of the experiences by gestational surrogates and the meaning of these experiences through their own words, using their blogs as data. The study objectives were to explore how U.S. gestational surrogate bloggers publically frame and self-represent their lived experiences as surrogates and to gain an understanding of the meaning and experience of surrogacy for these women, through a content analysis of their blogs. The research questions were: 1) what are gestational surrogate bloggers’ public expressions of their lived experiences? and 2) what are the meanings that they attach to their experiences as surrogates?

Methods: I used interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) to guide the study. The purpose of IPA is to offer insight into how a particular group of people make meaning of specific phenomena. IPA maintains an idiographic focus, in which individual accounts of experience over time. I identified publically available blogs using a Google search, in which no membership or password was needed for access to the blog. I reviewed a total of 22 blogs written by U.S. surrogates, who had been blogging about their surrogacy experience for at least one year. I transferred the content of each blog into a Word document and uploaded each document into Deedose analysis platform for coding. The analysis procedure was informed by an inductive coding process that was iterative and included several rounds of coding and re-coding the data.

 Findings:  There were five thematic expressions that were common across blogs: 1. pride in surrogacy work, 2. identification as a member of a special community, 3. commitment to surrogacy education and advocacy, 4. emphasis on the child not being the surrogate’s baby, and 5. The importance of the relationship with the commissioning parents.

Conclusion: This study was intended to provide a glimpse of some surrogates’ public expressions of meaning of their lived experiences. Based on this content analysis, these women view surrogacy as a generally positive and empowering experience. In most of the academic discourse on surrogacy, surrogates’ voices are missing and assumptions are made that surrogacy is exploitive and dehumanizing. As social workers begin to identify their role in regulating this rapidly growing family building option, we must include surrogates’ narratives in this process.